Phil Bradley's Blog

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For librarians and people interested in search engines, searching the net, designing web pages, new utilities and so on. Short commentaries, keeping you up to date with the world of internet search and design.

Friday, April 30, 2004

Thursday, April 29, 2004

Compare your positions in a number of search engines. Thumbshots.com Ranking allows you to input a search, with an option to highlight a particular site, and then see the results that you get from different engines. An absolute must see.Phil 7:52 AM

If you think you get pretty much the same results from all the search engines, think again. This article, entitled Exploring Search Engine Overlap explains that there's actually very little overlap, and sites that rate highly in Google fare poorly in Yahoo, and vice versa.Phil 7:49 AM

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

An item from the BBC news entitled BT broadband to reach almost all says that BT will be able to provide broadband to just about everyone, with the exception of remote locations by next year.Phil 9:06 AM

The article from the BBC news entitled 'UK libraries out of use by 2020' suggests that if the trend for visitor number continues as it has been since 1984, people will stop using libraries completely within 16 years. Interestingly, although there is comment from Libri, there's nothing from CILIP - I wonder if the BBC asked?Phil 10:44 AM

Monday, April 26, 2004

Saturday, April 24, 2004

Very good article on the fact that the Google safe search filter doesn't work well. Entitled Google's chastity belt too tight the article explains how the filter blocks a lot of perfectly innocent sites.Phil 7:54 AM

Very short article, but an interesting one on Frames and Search Engines which explains how, if you're using frames, you can still get search engines to index at least something on the pages. Better yet, just don't use frames, but that's just my opinion!Phil 10:21 AM

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

If you've a couple of minutes to spare, take a look at the Top 500 Search Engine Keywords Of The Week. Fascinating stuff, seeing what people search for, and it just confirms what we already know - people usually search for just single words, or a very short combination.Phil 10:20 AM

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

A tecchie weblog entry from Topix.net on the amount of computing power Google has to have available to do everything that it does. Very interesting if you want to know exactly what powers Google.Phil 9:05 AM

There were no updates to the weblog last week, basically because I was out with the British Council in Oman running a series of courses for their Alumni and the Ministry of Education in Oman. I'm back again now of course, though I'm away over easter at the 2004 Science Fiction Eastercon. Full service will be resumed when I'm back.Phil 8:12 AM

Anyone else noticed this? If you used to run a search at AlltheWeb for the number of links a site had, you used to get a lot of results; I had over 8,000. However, if you try the search now:AlltheWeb.com: Web results for "link:http://www.philb.com -domain:www.philb.com" it only retrieves a small fraction of that number. This brings the search engine much more in line with the Google result. What's happened to all the rest though?Phil 8:08 AM

For those parents and teachers looking for good websites for children, you might want to explore KIDS.us which provides several different categories - arts, entertainment, computers, games, news, our world, science, sport and other cool stuff. Not brilliant, but it's going in the right direction.Phil 7:57 AM

Another in the series of articles that are appearing that knocks Google. The BBC News report "Life beyond Google" draws the (IMO correct) answer that 'Google is not the only way to find information online'.Phil 7:52 AM

Monday, April 05, 2004

Create a profile of what you're interested in, and the Google Personalized Search will rank appropriate items higher in the results than they would have done otherwise. Makes sense, but why did it take so long?Phil 9:00 AM

It's about time Google got their act together on this one. You can now get Google to create a Google Web Alert. The search engine will run your search and send you results every day or every week. I'll try it out and let you know what I find...Phil 8:59 AM

You'll have heard by now that Google is going to be offering an email service, and as usual, there has been a lot of discussion about it. CNET News.com has a good article, pointing out that it's yet another area of expansion for the search engine, but has linked it to fears of a loss of privacy.Phil 8:36 AM

Nice facts and figures article from Searchenginewatch which shows that Google still has 40% of search referrals, Yahoo has 27%, MSN 19%, then there's the rest of the engines bringing up the rear. It seems that the change Yahoo made to their search engine of choice hasn't been a failure. Phil 8:31 AM